Quirky

• Men will have flying machines built into their clothes and use them to pursue women; women will use the same to escape from men.

• New York City will be covered by a giant man-made roof from which humans will control the weather below.

• Having sex with robots will be commonplace; technovirgins (humans who have only had sex with robots) will proliferate.

Those are not predictions about the future. They are past predictions—from 1885, 1901, 1949 and 1997, respectively—about the word of today. They, and many more past visions of the future, are collected on the website Paleofuture.

Sure your standard bookshelf dictionary is useful for looking up the definitions of words that are, you know, “acceptable.” But what about cutting edge slang words? Or words no longer in use? Or words you can use to insult a Klingon? For that you need an out-of-the-ordinary dictionary. Here are eight of our online favorites:

We absolutely love maps. We have since we were six years old when we traced out a giant map of the world and then painstakingly demarcated the territories that would be controlled by each of our stuffed animals.

In the hope that some of our readers enjoy maps as much as we do we present one of our favorite blogs: Strange Maps.

In addition to being used to relay the exact words from another source, quotation marks can be used to convey misnomers and denote inaccuracies. If you write Her shirt looks interesting then that may be taken at face value. Her shirt looks “interesting” probably means that her shirt was, in fact, butt ugly. Though even more insulting would be Her “shirt” look interesting, indicating that what she was wearing could hardly qualify as a shirt at all.

If you are single it may feel like you’ve searched everywhere for your special someone. But maybe you haven’t really searched, you know, everywhere. Like inside prison. Now, thanks to the magic of the internet, you don’t have to be a petty criminal to look for love inside the big house. At meet-an-inmate.com you can peruse prisoner personals—#198676 has a love of animals and a passion for cooking, #213783 loves all types of music—and then write an old fashion snail mail letter to your selection. If nothing else it is a way to brighten some one’s day. We’re just not sure we’d give our home address for a reply.